In a new report, Human Rights Watch criticises the International Monetary Fund saying that setting conditions for its loans, risks undermining people’s economic, social, and cultural rights, and that the IMF conditions on countries are compounding problems related to rising inequality.

The Human Rights Watch report claims that despite its promises to learn from past mistakes, the IMF is pushing policies that have a long track record of exacerbating poverty and inequality and undermining rights.

The 131-page report, “Bandage on a Bullet Wound: IMF Social Spending Floors and the Covid-19 Pandemic,” analyzes loans approved from March 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, until March 2023 to 38 countries, with a total population of 1.1 billion, and finds that the vast majority are conditioned on austerity policies, which reduce government spending or increase regressive taxes in ways likely to harm rights.

It also finds that recent IMF initiatives, announced at the beginning of the pandemic, to mitigate these impacts such as social spending floors are flawed and ineffective in addressing the harms caused by the policies.

The report features a case study of Jordan, where a series of IMF programs have introduced sweeping economic reforms over the past decade, but mitigation measures have been inadequate to address the harm to rights.

HRW